Familly, Nothing More, Nothing Less
by Karen Hikari
Summary: Honestly, when he saw his wife and his son, together, he couldn't help but think that this was the family that he'd wished for all along, nothing more, nothing less.


**Hi! Remember how I've been saying I'd eventually write down a story in which Hades is a nice, caring father? Well, this is it! It's finally here!**

 **This story that had been roaming around in my head, even when the idea is not totally mine, but a friend's.**

 **How this story finally got to you is kind of interesting: this friend and I were talking and then the first plot for this story appeared, then he had a second idea that included Persephone and Hades, a little of Will and a bit of Aphrodite, and they sounded sort of similar, so I decided to join them, but when I was writing the first draft it didn't seem to be going to work, so I mixed them up but split part of the first and of part second for the other story and... Well, my life and my head are a mess, but I promise you'll have a nice story to read and I hope taht's enough for you. That surely is enough for me.**

 **So, expect the other story in a couple of months, now that I got a cold and I can't speak and that totally makes my life miserable, but I really hope you enjoy this!**

* * *

 ** _Family, Nothing More, Nothing Less_**

* * *

Hades had never been one to openly show affection. Never, in his long, long centuries and ions.

However, that didn't enable him of _feeling_ it, even when people often mistook one thing with the other and didn't quite realize that they were different matters.

Another thing people commonly confused were love and affect.

You see, Hades _loved_ Persephone, and he just barely felt _affect_ towards his mortal lovers.

And one may ask, if he loved his wife, then why was it that he even _had_ mortal lovers to start with?

The answer to that question was as simple as for the previous ones: it wasn't women the ones he looked for and fell in love with, but something else entirely.

It was the children. What he craved for wasn't a companion or a sporadic lover—he had a wife which he adored and he knew he was corresponded.

No, what he was looking for was something Persephone couldn't give him, something that was part of a family just as much as the very same wife or husband—children.

For those who knew better and that wanted to be rude or meddlesome enough, the truth was that Persephone _had_ had children, centuries in the past, but it wasn't out of physical incapacity that Hades had been talking about now, was it?

It hadn't been Persephone's decision to have those children, and she in fact didn't love them. She hardly was able to stand listening to her spawns' names, let alone look at them.

On the other side, those weren't Hades' sons, but Zeus', as the almighty king of gods had decided to make his own daughter's life impossible.

Currently, Zagreus, Persephone's first son, also known as Yacus after an issue that involved Hera's jealously and giants before he'd reincarnated as Dionysius had taken a place in Olympus while Melinoe, Persephone's daughter, remained as a helper of Thanatos, living in the Underworld and completely depending on her stepfather's domain.

Hades had never been mad or even slightly upset at Persephone because of those children, and the reason that he hadn't thrown a fuss over his wife's out-marriage spawn as his sister Hera did was simple: just by staring into Persephone's eyes he was able to see how much that betrayal –that he couldn't even blame on the spring goddess as Zeus had raped her– pained her, and how ashamed she felt.

After that, having a child that was their own had been completely out of the table for the couple, and Hades had never dared bring the matter up, even when the one thing that the god of the Underworld wanted was to raise a child with Persephone.

That was the one thing that he looked for on mortals. He didn't want love or an exciting night, he wanted a child. What he wanted was not a lasting relationship with a pretty woman, but a spawn, a descendant.

He wasn't sure, but sometimes he thought that Persephone _knew_ , knew what he did and also knew the reason why he did it, but the spring goddess never once questioned him or even complained about the mortal women he had affairs with.

He loved Persephone, loved her as the one and only person he wanted to spend his life with. Those mortals? They were just a spring-summer way to spend his time when Persephone was away. Those were women that he could only grow fond once in a while, even when he _did_ respect them, nonsense as that may have sounded.

The children, though, were something else entirely.

He loved his children, he loved them deeply, although he couldn't be a constant presence in their lives because of the job he was expected to perform and because he wasn't even sure of how to demonstrate that affection to start with.

And thus was the way his marriage worked for years, for centuries. He would have an affair with a mortal he just barely felt affect for, have a child he would learn to love even when he could only see a glimpse of every once in a while just to lose that child to the claws of the one thing he was supposed to rule over—death, and then he would go back to Persephone's arms.

He knew he was being selfish, he knew. He knew he was hurting those women, and he knew he was hurting his unborn sons ever since they were conceived because he would never be able to be the father that those children needed and deserved.

That was the reason why he never lied to the women he would ultimately involucrate himself with.

Unlike the other Olympians, he never tried to hide his true identity, opposing to that, he was honest from the very beginning, telling the women he met who he was and what they were getting themselves into by falling in love with him.

Such a blunt honesty most of times served to scare those women away, either because they thought he was crazy, or because they simply didn't believe a word he said.

However, once in a while, someone would believe him, and she would stay with him, always aware of the fact that such a relationship was destined not to last.

And when that affair was over, he would turn his back and never look back to the woman, not when he had his very own queen waiting for him at his marbled castle.

And Persephone let him do, faking her obliviousness to his actions.

That was not it when it came to Maria di Angelo.

Maria was different, original and naïve in every way there was to be. Maria was extroverted, confident, beautiful in more ways that Hades could count, and she was also aware of the beauty she held within herself.

It hadn't started as anything other than a simple affair, as did all the others, and it had rapidly escalated to become a real relationship, one very similar to the one a couple of common mortals shared.

Maria was a singer, and actress, and a very attractive woman, and so he learned to love her.

Hades never revealed, however, that each time he heard Maria sing all that he could listen was Persephone's velvety voice, and he'd also never admit that he loved the way Maria's hair was straight and raven black but curled up at the tips, just like Persephone's, with the exception that his wife's hair was a mahogany brown.

It had been just a matter of time before Maria became pregnant with what would be their first child, a beautiful baby girl. True to say, Hades had been slightly surprised when he'd been revealed the sex of the baby, as all of his other spawn had resulted in being males.

Hades was the gods of riches, if not only of death, but if he were to say the jewel that sparkled the most, be would have answered that it was Maria's obsidian eyes each time she looked down at their baby. Bianca, she had named her, in memory of her own mother.

There was something different in Maria, something that all of his previous affairs had lacked of.

She didn't try to retain him, and neither did she try to pretend that he didn't have a family that didn't include her. Maria knew who he was, and most importantly, Maria accepted it. She knew he would never be able to stay with her, or with their daughter, but she simply let it go, and enjoyed whatever time they had with each other.

Maybe she was a dreamer, maybe she was just too naïve, but Hades had never really stopped to analyze what was it that made Maria so special. She simply was herself, and he simply loved her for it.

Thus was probably the reason why he hadn't fled from Maria's side. She was a comprehensive woman, and she understood that his world didn't revolve around her. Neither did hers revolve around the underworld god. And it was exactly because he had the freedom to decide that he chose to stay with her every time.

When only a few years later their second child, Nico, was born, Hades wasn't even surprised.

True, Maria was the first mortal woman with which he had stayed more than a couple of months, and the first one with which he had more than one child, but he was not amused.

That was Maria di Angelo, after all, and if there was a woman worth a second glance of his, that one certainly was the talented Italian.

–*–*–

Hades had been more than three millennia in the world and he had seen a lot of things, and had met face to face with a whole bunch of emotions, but if there was one with which he was not familiarized with that one surely was guilt.

However, _guilty_ was exactly how he'd felt some years later, when one of his _other_ offspring decided to start the most memorable and —tragic— war of all times.

During the second half of 1939, just a few months before he met Maria, Adolf Hitler began the movements that would ultimately lead to the Second World War.

He, as the god of the Underworld, was able to understand the dimensions of the war his son was upraising sooner than any other of the Olympians could say, and even when he was horrified beyond words of the amount of death and catastrophes that such a war would bring, he was more ashamed of the fact that the one motivating such a thing was a spawn of his.

However, when he felt the most ashamed was when some years later, after the war had finally exploded, he saw himself in the need of telling Maria that she and the children were to leave Italy and travel to America in search of a safer place.

That time, Maria had simply nodded knowingly and totally agreed with him.

She had agreed to leave her whole life behind overnight and in an eye-bat, then why, oh why, Hades would ask himself years later, once Maria had been wiped from the world of the living, once that the family he'd once dreamed of had been ripped apart, if she had agreed to leave Italy in a night, then why hadn't she agreed to leave America and travel to the Underworld when both things had wanted to achieve the same thing?

But right then, he hadn't known, and none had he suspected that when the most important decision would come, Maria would chose wrongly.

As they fled Italy, he had promised her a house in America, but it soon appeared that Maria was pickier than he had ever thought when it came to choose the place of her living, and that concluded with the former actress and the kids living in the most luxurious hotel in New Jersey.

She wanted it to be perfect, Maria said. She wanted her home to be wonderful and good enough and worth of her family. And really, Hades couldn't deny anything that Maria asked him, not when her eyes were so resolved and shiny when she asked.

On the other, Hades also found adorable how Maria tried to speak English most of time but still finished up mixing Italian words as she spoke.

It was probably during the time that Maria stayed in New Jersey and during the months that he'd spent traveling from the Underworld to Italy in order to meet with Maria and the children that Hades could truly say he was happy. He had a family he loved, a woman that loved him, and for once, what filled his ears were not the terrified screams of ghosts in pain, but the innocent laughter of his very own children.

And yes, he was happy. So, so happy, that when he held his children in his arms, World War II and Adolf Hitler and his brothers and the Olympians didn't matter,

Of course, he should have known better than to believe that such a thing would last.

Little had he known, however, that the luxurious hotel they had chosen as a new beginning would be the end of that small glimpse of happiness in the god's life.

He knew he had to protect Maria and the children, and not only from the war or from Hitler, but from his very own brothers.

If there was one golden rule for Hades, that was to never mix up his mortal affairs with his marriage. Persephone was his wife, his queen, the one he shared his domains with, and he loved her, and even when he had grown to love Maria, it was a different kind of love, and one woman was not to be compared with the other.

However, as he felt Zeus' claws got closer to his beloved Italian beauty, all ancient rules that he might have respected until then went to waste.

He _needed_ to protect Maria, and if taking her to the Underworld was the only way to achieve her protection, nothing else mattered to Hades, and he was willing to do it, willing to do whatever to grant her safety.

But she had refused.

Maria di Angelo, the one and only woman he had learned to love had denied his offering, claiming that the Underworld was nowhere near the place she wanted to raise her children in. And she was right, Hades thought, the Underworld was not the shiny and colorful place that Maria dreamed of, or that she was used to live in, but it was safe, and safety was the only thing that Hades cared for at the moment.

Not so for Maria, though, as she continued to refuse every time he dared bring the matter up.

And so Zeus decided that a child of his was unworthy of living, or perhaps too dangerous to continue living, like Zeus preferred to put it. As if that fixed anything.

Just like the distracted and careless person he was, the so-called king of gods failed in his one and only job and instead of killing either of Hades' children he ended up hitting a woman so sweet that if only he could die he would have gone to Tartarus to redeem himself of the murdering he was responsible of.

Hades knew that he'd done the right thing. He'd saved his children, he'd done what Maria would have wanted him to do, and he knew that if he'd been able to save Maria instead of the children, Maria would have never forgiven him. And yet, even when he _knew_ he'd acted as he was expected and that he'd done the right thing, he had been destroyed by Maria's death.

Almost a century after that, Alecto had asked him why he had sent Nico and Bianca to the Lotus Casino instead of taking them with him to the Underworld as he was bound to do right before Maria's death.

The reason was simple—he knew he would never been able to raise his children, Maria's children, without her, especially not in the Underworld.

With Maria, things would have been different, she would have brought her beauty and her light to the Underworld and she would have managed to make a happy place out of it. Without her, he just couldn't. He didn't know how to do it. He simply was unable to do it.

And so he had asked Alecto for the one and other thing that Maria wouldn't have forgiven him of doing—he sent his own children to the Lotus Casino, on their own.

He was being selfish, he was, because even when his goal to achieve was to protect his children, and even when the kids had managed to survive, he had abandoned them, he had turned his back on them when they had needed him the most.

Maybe that was why he'd also asked Alecto to erase their memories, because he couldn't bear to see them knowing how much of a failure of a father he had been when he hadn't been able to save their mother, and how neither had he been able to save them, and maybe, just maybe what he really wanted to hide was how he simply couldn't be the father that they needed, that they deserved.

–*–*–

When during the spring of 1946, after the end of the Second World War the idea of forbidding the Big Three of having any more demigod children came to light, Hades was the first one to agree.

Of course he didn't want any more children. Why do that?, he wondered. Why force and innocent child to endure so much pain when he so obviously couldn't fulfill his role as a father? Why?

And so he promised not only to his brothers or to the Styx River, but to himself—never again would he look at a mortal with the intention of building a relationship with her or even have a one-night affair. Never again would he be the forefather of a child, neither mortal nor immortal, as it had been proven so many times before that a spawn of his could only reap pain and hatred.

–*–*–

After that, more than sixty years went by before he even dared to think about bringing Nico and Bianca out of the casino.

There was no real reason behind the late timing he'd chosen other than fear. He was terrified. Terrified of what Zeus would do to his children if he ever found out they were alive. He even had once thought that perhaps it would have been better if they had died with Maria, only to drown himself in guilt right after.

Never had thought of breaking the oath cross his mind, simply because he, at least, knew what compromise meant, even when Zeus so obviously did not, but it wasn't until Poseidon's spawn showed up that he even considered bringing his own children to the modern world.

Maybe it was something else. Maybe he was not even scared of his brothers' reaction, but of the children, of his very own children, in themselves.

His children hadn't seen him in decades, and even when he had silently appeared in the casino on a few occasions, the image was just so heart-breaking for him that it resulted unbearable for the immortal to keep on with those sporadic visits—two children, frozen in time, growing motherless and memory-less, if the word even existed.

For a moment, before he sent Alecto looking for them, he considered bringing his children, his very own children, to live in the Underworld with him, where they would age normally, and still be safe from Zeus' eyes, but he gave up the idea when he realized just how much such a thing would hurt his beloved Persephone.

He had already caused enough pain, he decided, and so he ordered Alecto to free them from the cage that the Lotus Casino was but to take them away again, and to hide the truth from them, because that was the one thing he knew how to do properly—hide, lie.

–*–*–

If Hades were to say what had surprised him the most when he had first seen his children out of the casino, that sure was when he'd listened to Nico expressing about the gods and goddesses, because even when he knew that his son was talking about his game and not about the actual creatures, the boy wasn't scared, but he was excited, and the Fates knew that Nico was the first person in _centuries_ that thought about him, Hades, the god of the Underworld, and didn't feel a shudder running down his spine.

No, far from that, Nico di Angelo, the son of the one mortal that Hades had learned to love, was excited, and when he thought of monsters and gods, what filled his mind wasn't blood and despair, but amazement and wonder.

And Hades knew that Nico was not talking about the real him, but every time that he saw his son's eyes sparkle –much like Maria's eyes had, decades in the past— when he spoke about him, Hades, or said that he, Hades, had a 4,000 attack power points, 5,000 if the opponent attacked first, Hades' heart would skip a beat and he'd feel the warmness he now identified as fondness blossom in his heart.

It probably was stupid, and it most certainly sounded lame, but it was all that he had, and it was the closest that the god of the Underworld would ever be to his own son.

And so he fooled himself into thinking that the one his son admired and looked up to was he, even when he perfectly knew the boy was talking about a cardboard cart. How stupid, how lame, he knew.

–*–*–

Little did he know, however, that Nico tried to do the same thing when the time for him to be revealed his past and his parentage.

He'd only been a ten-year-old boy at the time, Hades thought, why was he asked to lose the light of his eyes so soon? Why was such a young boy, regardless the parentage, robbed of all the innocence his small body had after he'd already lost everything to a war that wasn't even his to fight? Why?

But of course, Hades had no saying on the matter, and thus all that he could do was watch, stop and stare, as his son not only lost his sister, the only constant in his life that the boy had ever known, but also as he lost the innocence and naïve believes he'd held so dearly.

For short, he watched his son lose himself and found himself unable to save him, or to even near him.

Because he was no hero, Hades knew, and no amount of power point or attacks could ever restore what his child had lost, and he had to bow his head in shame and answer his own son, same that still held the most desperate hope in that Hades, the real god, was somewhat similar to the Hades' figurine he'd played with and tell him that no, he was not cardboard image, and no, he was not only a powerful card to play. He was real, he was tangible, and he was not a hero, crashing whatever hopefulness his son might still have had on him.

The worst thing he ever did, however, came some months later, when he had to refuse something to his son again, this time, though, something that he, too, wanted and craved for with his whole self. Bringing Maria and Bianca back to life.

But no, he couldn't do it, he couldn't revive them. He was the god of the Underworld and death and yet he couldn't bring his very own family from his own domains.

Neither could he restore Nico's memories, no matter how much Nico pleaded for him to do it, and no matter how much he in fact wanted to do it.

The two rivers that flowed in front of his palace, the Lethe and the Styx, both had a reason to exist.

One, the Styx, brought the newly arrived souls to the Underworld. The Lethe, on the other side, erased the memory of the spirits that were to reincarnate, as a new life can't be started with memories from the past.

There was only one way to bring back the memories that had been lost at the Lethe, and it was to submerge oneself in its contradistinction, the Styx.

Hades knew he was being selfish by not letting Nico have his past back to him, nonsense as that sounded, but the boy was not ready yet.

Nico was not yet over Bianca's death, how could someone ask Hades, the children's father, to allow Nico to realize the full picture of what he'd lost and didn't even remember? How could he just go and give Nico the pain of knowing he'd lost his mother, too, before losing his sister? How?

He was protecting him, he was, even when he was being selfish and egoistic. He was protecting his son, always, even when Nico, or anyone else, for that matter, couldn't understand what he was doing and what he was trying to achieve by it.

He was protecting his family, or whatever little was left from it.

–*–*–

And so it was with little things like that ones that his son started to lose the hope in him, and it was with little things like that ones that he, too, started to lose the hope in himself.

He was the god of the Underworld, after all, the god of death, what did he expect to rule over, to have? Love? What a joke.

–*–*–

Somehow, he still hadn't managed to explain to himself, it was Nico the one who convinced him to side up with the Olympians during the war against Kronos.

He knew he was being selfish and ego-centric by not helping his brothers, but he just didn't care. What had his brothers ever done for him? Zeus had rapped his wife and then killed Maria; Poseidon rarely even talked to him; Hera seemed to have forgotten about his existence, and Demeter couldn't even think of him without throwing a fuss over something that had happened centuries in the past.

Only Hestia was someone that he thought of with fondness, but when he reflected on it more closely, he could feel his blood boiling with rage, as he remembered how she had been dismissed of her tittle just so Zeus' spawn could have it.

Thus was the reason why he refused, categorically, to join his so-called family in the war against Kronos.

They had handled perfectly fine without his help for centuries, why should he join them now, when he had no responsibility to do it and when he was not willing to? Why do it when they were at their worst and when they had done nothing to help him when he'd been at his?

Because, Nico had reminded him, that was exactly what family was for.

That child's mother had died more than fifty years in the past, and he could barely remember her. His father had always been a cero to the left in his life, always absent or missing, sometimes even considered to be dead, and his sister had turned her back on him just before she died. What family, Hades asked himself later, what family did that child know?

And yet, there was his son, begging and pleading for him to join the family he didn't even know in a war that wasn't his to fight.

It was then that he felt proud for the first time in centuries. It was then that the fierceness of Nico's eyes reminded him of Maria's in something other than the shape or color.

And it was then that he realized that the woman he had loved still lived inside her — _their_ — son.

And it was then that he gave into what Nico was asking for and agreed to fight side by side with the Olympians, with his family.

–*–*–

Sadly, and very lamely too, having saved Olympus didn't mean that Hades' relationship with his siblings was restored, or even the one with his son. It only meant that—he had helped save Olympus, as they all had.

Nico and he, though, were as distant as ever, and even when he knew there were some things that he could have done to fix that, he just couldn't think of any.

–*–*–

Hades wasn't one to always look at things on the bright side, but even he had to admit his relief when after the war with Kronos, Persephone's resentment towards Nico backed off.

Persephone was a comprehensive woman, a loving woman, and most of all, a very clever one too.

Sure, she had been _hurt_ , but even when pain _could_ turn into hatred overtime, one could be hurt and not necessarily hate the one that had forced that pain on oneself.

Persephone was that kind of person. She was hurt, pained, and she felt humiliated, but she wasn't hateful or remotely spiteful towards the ones who had hurt her.

As a matter of fact, she knew where she was standing, and the reason that Hades was saying such a thing didn't have anything to do with Maria, but with the same Persephone—she herself was the result of an untruthfulness of Zeus to Hera, and maybe thus was the reason why she had never turned bitter on her husband's demigods children or tried to make their lives impossible.

Maybe, he thought, she even envied his mortal lovers, but in a way completely different from the one that might have seemed: they loved their children. Mortal women could raise and love and be loved by their sons—she could not.

Perhaps, Hades wondered, thus was the reason that her attitude towards Nico had changed so much over the years.

Sometimes, he couldn't help but find ironic how it had been Persephone the first one to approach Nico and how she was the first one that Nico let in.

It was so gradual at first, that Hades didn't even notice it, but somehow, slowly, Nico stopped being so jumpy around them, and he changed his attitude towards them, not being so blunt when he spoke anymore.

What he did notice, though, was how Persephone's voice softened as she called the boy's name, or how her eyes sparkled with fondness instead of contempt when she stared down at Nico.

It was she who first heard the screams that echoed all the way through the hallways from Nico's room and into theirs. It was she who first pointed out how thin Nico was and how deep the bags under his eyes were. And lastly, it was also she who first proposed for Nico to stay in the Underworld with them and who first started to call the three of them 'family', maybe unintentionally, or maybe with all the intention of doing it.

Hades was not one to let his actions be guided by emotions, and neither was he known for his ability at reading them on other people, but even he had to notice that, after the war with Kronos, the atmosphere to breath in his obsidian castle was different.

Although Nico and he could still not be described as close, he wasn't as indifferent to his son either, and even when Persephone and Nico had started off as cold enemies, Persephone's eyes had slowly warmed to the young boy after the war.

Persephone had never hated Nico, or Bianca, or even Maria, and Hades knew better than that when he stared into her emerald eyes.

Nico was an orphan boy that couldn't even remember his mother's face while Persephone was a married woman with much love to give, and it was the Fates who had made them found each other in the same family, after all.

The truth was, Hades didn't even care about the coherent reason as to why things had changed or as to why Persephone had started to genuinely worry about her stepson. He didn't care about 'how' or about 'why', he simply couldn't care about such things after the change had finally occurred.

Because, sincerely, how could he care about a why when he had finally seen his son smile in his presence because of one of Persephone's comments after so many years of isolation? How could he care about the how's when he saw Persephone draw her arms around Nico's lean shoulders and he didn't reject her for the first time?

And, honestly, when he heard his son's and wife's laughter or so much as saw them smile at each other with fondness, he couldn't help but smile himself. Honestly, when he saw his wife and his son, together, he couldn't help but think that this was the family that he'd wished for all along, nothing more, nothing less.

* * *

 **What do you think? Let me know in your comments!**


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